When Aubrey Beardsley was six years old, the miniature
dandy stood with his mother in Westminster Abbey and declared himself to be "rather
good looking." It was his physical appearance above everything else, he decided,
that should be immortalized in art after his passing. Unfortunately, we're all rather
good-looking at such a young age, and Beardsley later grew to be startlingly thin
and sallow (as did his nose). Still, his frank declaration of self-enchantment reveals
the sort of infatuation and eroticism that would become the very connotation of his
famous name and artwork. For all its necessary ruffles and roses, Matthew Sturgis'
Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography is an excellent and unintoxicated study of this
notorious life that paints all the decadence of fin-de-siècle London without
overlooking the serious intellectual development that lead to the rise of the dandy
archetype in stature and style.

Shockingly, Beardsley was not reared by fleshy, wine-sipping gods in a forest
of symbols. Instead, he was born into a working-class Brighton family burdened by
debt and a tragically weak father. Sturgis earnestly documents the first stages of
Beardsley's life delicately and with little hint of the irony that a figure as pompous
as Beardsley might actually deserve. The sad details of the Beardsley family misfortunes,
from their constant relocations to Aubrey's first childhood brushes with tuberculosis,
are balanced with images of evenings by the piano and wildly precocious literary
and artistic feats on Aubrey's part. Sturgis also deftly sums up the social mindframe
of the witty late-18th century with a gentle cruelty in his language. He describes
a local priest as "burned not only with the zeal of his vocation but with the
fire of tuberculosis," and later laments the budding Aubrey Beardsley as "trapped
in an uncongenial job and an unsatisfactory body."

The richest passages of the biography, however, come in the middle chapters chronicling
Beardsley's entrance into fame and notoriety. Sturgis displays a thorough comprehension
of the artistic and philosophical issues of Beardsley's London, and he does well
to illustrate the all-engrossing polemic between the Impressionist and Pre-Raphaelite
camps, both of which pulled at Beardsley's pencil. Of course, Beardsley was never
the kind of artist who could be shelved away under such rubrics; instead, he stole
and stretched images from these more academic masters and combined them with a fetishy
Asian exoticism to arrive at designs both structurally crisp and aesthetically sumptuous.
Sturgis is thankfully unconcerned with glorifying the artist, frankly disclosing
his lies and attempts at self-promotion: "Beardsley's behaviour had been petty
and vain. It had also been deliberate. One of Wilde's favourite dicta was that in
art 'il faut toujours tuer son pere.'"

If there are any deficiencies in Sturgis' study, they come only at times when
he fails to plunge deeper into the philosophy and limits of Beardsley's drawings.
For example, he is correct to assert Baudelaire's essay "The Painter of Modern
Life" as a seminal work in the creation of the dandy, especially one who is
a visual artist like Beardsley, but he also sells it short by summarizing it as a
manifesto for the "cult of oneself." Like Beardsley and his art, the essay
focuses not so much on the artifice and aesthetic of luxury as on the elusive nature
of the present and its relation to history. The painter in Baudelaire's essay constructs
a growing mountain of pencil sketches in his hurried and doomed attempt to capture
the fleeting present. That's an image that is more accurate in revealing the tragedy
and romance of a dandy like Beardsley than any sort of Wildean sexy smartass witticism.
Despite missing a few chances to truly legitimize Aubrey Beardsley's work, Sturgis
does construct a dramatic and pathos-laden narrative of a life that smelled of sweat
just as much as roses. David Garza

My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1998

by George W.S. Trow

Pantheon Books, $24 hard

George W.S. Trow's Within the Context of No
Context, published in 1981, is a cult favorite among students of American pop
culture, and for good reason. In it, Trow, a longtime New Yorker staff writer,
did two new things. One was to take the popular (non-serious) media of the late Seventies
(People, Esquire, Life) and in its own terms closely examine
its writing and layout style and the implications of those choices. His style was
late New Journalism (Tom Wolfe without the white suit) and featured headlines in
bold type to indicate a new thought. The other was to analyze, in a groundbreaking
way, what rock & roll and fashion celebrity had become in the early Eighties,
in the form of a journal-like story focusing on a few days spent with Ahmet Ertegun,
the founder of Atlantic Records. It is titled "Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused,
Fickle, Perverse (Ahmet Ertegun)." Read this.

Trow's new work, My Pilgrim's Progress, is related to No Context
in a personal way and is a fascinating step backward in time. Rather than attempt
to try and keep up and make a transition from Bianca Jagger to Courtney Love, Trow
performs the culturally brave maneuver of analyzing (very closely once more) the
culture that celebrity journalism succeeded. This culture is personified by the major
political figures of his youth: Winston Churchill, FDR, and Eisenhower. His approach
this time is to teach us how to fold and then read the front page of The New York
Times. To immerse himself in the dailiness of this period, he copied and read
the front pages of the Times from the month of February, 1950. Fast-forwarding
from the specific to the cosmic, Trow quickly analyzes what has endured from the
"theatre" of the front page in February, 1950: television.

The personal touches begin to edge in when Trow reveals that his father was a
New York newspaperman from an old WASP family. Although raised in a family that worshipped
the Roosevelts, Trow amusingly describes his love for Eisenhower during the campaign
of 1952, when he was nine and wore a cap to school covered with "I Like Ike"
campaign buttons. The crush on Ike, whom Trow describes as having "the best
Rolodex ever" does not seem to have abated.

Trow reminds us that a political leader in 1950 would likely have been born in
the 1890s and therefore would have had an Edwardian childhood. The lag between politics
and popular culture clicks into focus when figured in this light (think Ike and Elvis,
Jimmy Carter and the Sex Pistols). His thoughts on the Fifties are deep and concerned
with surface all at once. The chapter called "Hitch and Elvis" (Hitchcock
and Presley) is a bracing approach to understanding how 1950s America both feared
its new power in a post-war world and at the same time began producing media and
entertainment that changed the rest of the century. So, read this one too, but a
warning: The first 56 pages are really nothing but a bunch of throat clearing and
dithering about before he gets down to business. Dick Holland